Marcus Wareing

The chef recalls the horrors of breaded plaice and overcooked spring lamb

I could never understand why we couldn’t have normal food at Easter, but Mum would insist on putting together a grand two-day eating plan. This was always the same and the worst part was the breaded plaice supper on Good Friday – it was the only time of the year we had plaice. She served it with tartar sauce and a tin of processed peas that she tried to turn into mushy peas by cooking them to oblivion and covering them with sugar and salt. I still don’t understand why she did that.

Mum was a great baker but not a particularly good cook. That said, there was a home-cooked meal on the table every night (usually meat and vegetables as my dad worked as a fruit and potato merchant). Occasionally we had boil-in-the-bag cod and parsley sauce, the only type of fish I had growing up in Lancashire in the 1970s – apart from Good Friday plaice, of course.

The lamb she served on Easter Sunday was just as bad as the breaded plaice. There was never any gravy and Dad would pour the lamb fat out of the roasting tin directly on top of the potatoes. He never wanted to see any blood so the lamb was always cooked to death.

My parents always made me finish my dinner, even though it was swimming in fat. One year, when I was about nine, I’d eaten so much Easter chocolate before dinner I felt ill, but my parents made me eat every bit anyway. Goodness knows how I ended up becoming a chef.

Marcus Wareing at the age of 8

Today, my own children are allowed chocolate but only a limited amount. This year we will spend Easter skiing in France, but if we were at home I would make roast lamb with spring vegetables – asparagus, peas, purple sprouting broccoli and Jersey Royal potatoes. And, of course, gravy.

My parents, however, still like to cook in their own way. They have quite traditional tastes and I respect that so when I cook for them I have to overcook the meat and make chips in a pan. But there’s no way I’ll ever serve breaded plaice.

Marcus Wareing is the founder of MW Restaurants and chef patron at two-Michelin-starred Marcus. His BBC4 series Chef vs Science starts on Wednesday

Anna Jones

A holiday in Puglia inspired the food writer to create a new tradition

The food writer Anna JonesCredit:
Matt Russell

A few years ago I spent Easter in Puglia. I was staying in a converted trullo, working on a book about the region’s food. It was warm. Mornings were spent at the market, where the oranges were so fresh the blossoms were still attached, there were early strawberries and stalls with towering piles of artichokes.

Around every corner in the old town were wooden trays covered with thin billowing fabric, hiding hand-rolled orecchiette. They sat outside the lace-curtained doorways of the nonnas who rolled them at a pace.

Traditional Italian trulli (cone-roofed houses)Credit:
Alamy

I love being in Italy at Easter. There is a sense of tradition: special cakes and pastries made only at that time of year. We spent that Easter making pasta, mastering the flick of the wrist and the deft sleight of hand we had seen. Everyone gathers without the bells and whistles that come with other holidays, and this pasta echoes that feeling, a sense of occasion without too much bother; it is the pasta I made there on Easter Sunday, and the pasta I have come to make every year since.

It is a little more indulgent than my usual weeknight pasta. You can use almost any good melting cheese you have to hand or a mixture of two cheeses; fontina is my favourite but a good cheddar or soft goats cheese would work well too. You could also use shredded kale or greens in place of the broccoli.

Sophie Thompson

The actress and Celebrity Masterchef on high winds and Scottish lochs

One of the Easters that really sticks in my mind is when Mum [the actress Phyllida Law] excelled herself with the Easter egg hunt. She’d done it all the way up the back hill of our cottage in Scotland – with the pièce de résistance being very large lollipops planted like flowers on the other side of a river.

Sophie and Emma Thompson with their mother, Phyllida Law

I will never forget the sight of them (I simply couldn’t believe it!), nor the scramble down the bank of the brook, and stone-stepping over it, to climb up and claim them.

Megsie left the tatties in the Aga for too long, so they were like bits of coal

Sophie Thompson

That year the meal was at our granny and grandpa’s – Megsie and Jacko – and at that time my uncle James lived with them too. He was a brilliant baker, and he had his own shop in the village, the Primrose Tearooms. He had made a simnel cake, which I had never beheld before.

I ate one of the blobs before supper, but had to spit it out because, as I discovered, I didn’t like marzipan.

Everyone had a big egg at their place. Mine was made of carob, as I was allergic to dairy – so irksome. Megsie had made a huge roast leg of lamb, with all the trimmings, but she’d left the tatties in the Aga for too long, so they were like bits of coal. None of us could stop laughing, and Megsie used to cry when she laughed, so we literally all ended up weeping with mirth.

The girls’ grandparents, Megsie and Jacko

When we’d eaten our own body weight in lamb and veg – and broken a tooth or two on the potatoes (OK, to be honest we didn’t even try eating them) – we all opened our eggs up. Mine said on its box that it was ‘stuffed with carob-coated raisins’ – but inside there was only a tiny sachet with about 25 raisins in it.

I insisted on writing a letter to the company right then and there. We wrote it as a team, and I seem to remember it was quite witty and sarcastic, and it made us all laugh again. The result, I might add, was a lot of sachets of carob-coated raisins in the post, and a very witty and sarcastic letter back.

Pudding was Uncle James’s simnel cake (which I resisted, obviously) and vanilla ice cream, with Megsie’s special melted Mars Bar sauce on top (which I didn’t). And when me, Mum, Dad and Em [the actress Emma Thompson] were walking back along the coast to our wee cottage, we had to hold on to each other, as the wind was so high we all thought we were going to be blown into the loch.

Because meals generally fly by compared to all the time they can take to prepare, I think it can help to start with a dip. It slows the proceedings down a bit, and means you don’t gobble the main course.